The best answers are given by security expert Bruce Shneier – why open wireless. The second best answer is that Tor hacker Jacob Applebaum also runs open WiFi.

Here are my answers, and the reasons why you should join us.

What’s changed?

The only difference between an encrypted wireless network and an open wireless network is that the part between your computer and the router is no longer encrypted by the router. Anyone can listen in, and anyone can connect to your router and access the big wide Internet.

The part between your computer and your router is only a tiny part of the journey your data takes between you and, say, your online bank. None of the part after the router has changed; if it was encrypted before, it still is, and if it wasn’t is still isn’t, and you should fix that. Read one for how.

Reason: It’s nice

Have you ever used anyone else’s open router? Maybe one named ‘dlink’, ‘linksys’, or a Mac AirPort? I bet you were happy that was there for you. When you move into a new home, when you have problems with your connection, or simply when you’re out and about, it’s great to have a free network. Opening up my network is my small way of giving back.

Myth: Bad people in your front garden

The first question most people ask about open wifi is this: What if someone uses my connection to do something bad?

To use your connection, they would have to be a direct neighbour of yours, or sitting outside your house.

Isn’t it more likely they would go that extra block to the warm and dry coffee shop?

Do you hear of coffee shop owners going to jail much? What about the ‘dlink’ and ‘linksys’ people? “Bad People” typically have their own Internet connection.

Real Risk: Eavesdropping

You might be worried that other people will steal your secrets. Again, they’d have to be sitting in your front garden.

There’s a much better place to steal people’s online banking data, than your front garden: in a coffee shop, at a conference, or, best of all, in an airport.

Reason: It makes you safer

You should setup your machine so that all your connections are encrypted, wherever you are. Opening your home wireless gives you that extra discipline.

• Secure your web browsing. When doing anything senstive, make sure you are using the ‘https’ protocol (your browser will be showing a padlock).

• Secure your email. If using webmail, make sure it’s over https. GMail, to Google’s great credit, has that as the default. If you are using regular email, makes sure you use the encrypted protocol – IMAPS or POPS.

• Secure you IM conversations. Google Talk is encrypted if your client supports it (Pidgin does). Skype is encrypted. As far as I could tell, Yahoo Messenger isn’t, so avoid it.

Weak Risk: Your neighbourhood hacker

If you’re using Windows, you should be running a personal firewall on your machine. I believe there is now one built-in to Windows. Make sure it is switched on.

Administration

Most computers will auto-connect to any available wireless network when they start up. If you notice the same machines on your network every day for a while, they are probably auto-connecting. You’ll need to add rules to your router to ban their MAC address, shunting them back to their own router.

The point of open wireless isn’t to make your neighbours Internet connection redundant, but to temporarily help people out. Your neighbours don’t want to use your connection, as their is typically faster for them (they are closer to their router).

Happy sharing!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/19distracted.html

Here’s some excerpts:

in a survey of 1,506 people last year by Nationwide Mutual Insurance, 81 percent of cellphone owners acknowledged that they talk on phones while driving, and 98 percent considered themselves safe drivers. But 45 percent said they had been hit or nearly hit by a driver talking on a phone.

That’s the Lake Wobegon effect, the tendency for overestimate their capabilities in relation to others.

…research, showing that multitasking drivers are four times as likely to crash as people who are focused on driving, matches the findings of two studies, in Canada and in Australia, of drivers on actual roads.

The highway safety administration estimates that drivers using a hand-held device are at 1.3 times greater risk of a crash or near crash, and at three times the risk when dialing, compared with others who are simply driving. The agency based its conclusions on research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which placed cameras inside cars to monitor drivers for more than a year. The study found cellphones to be the most common cause of driver distraction.

Research also shows that drivers conversing with fellow passengers do not present the same danger, because adult riders help keep drivers alert and point out dangerous conditions and tend to talk less in heavy traffic or hazardous weather.

The research shows that having a conversation on a hands-free sets is as dangerous as a conversation on a handheld phone – the problem is that, unlike a passenger, the person on the phone doesn’t stop distracting you when road conditions change, and they aren’t a second pair of eyes compensating for your distraction.

So if the research is so strong, there are so many lives to be saved, how come we haven’t solved this one yet. Read on:

Joe Simitian, a state senator in California, managed to get his hands-free legislation, an effort he began in 2001, passed in 2006. He argued, based on data collected by the California Highway Patrol, that drivers using cellphones caused more fatalities than all the drivers distracted by eating, children, pets or personal hygiene.

In each previous year, the bill was killed — after lobbying by cellphone carriers, including Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. Mr. Simitian said that in the first two years, he would visit the offices of his colleagues on the Transportation Committee on the day of the vote and “find three cellphone industry lobbyists sitting in the legislator’s office,” Mr. Simitian said. “They’d just smile.”

Extremist material of any kind always looks gaudy and cheap, like a bad pizza menu. Not because they can’t afford decent computers – these days you can knock up a professional CD cover on a pay-as-you-go mobile – but because anyone who’s good at graphic design is likely to be a thoughtful, inquisitive sort by nature. And thoughtful, inquisitive sorts tend to think fascism is a bit shit, to be honest. If the BNP really were the greatest British party, they’d have the greatest British designer working for them – Jonathan Ive, perhaps, the man who designed the iPod. But they don’t. They’ve got someone who tries to stab your eyes out with primary colours.

Read the article: Charlie Brooker on the BNP and their political broadcast.

Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.

Wow, what an exciting time to be in North America.

From the O’Reilly Radar.

It was an unreal, frightening time, and it was predictable that people would flee the airports. Perhaps surprisingly, though, they didn’t start digging backyard bomb shelters. Instead, most went to work and carried on living. They just didn’t fly. They drove instead.
Politicians worried what the mass exodus of Americans from planes to cars would do to the airline industry, so a bailout was put together. But no one talked about the surge in car travel. Why would they? It was trivia. There were deadly threats to worry about.
But what no politician mentioned is that air travel is safer than driving. Dramatically safer – so much so that the most dangerous part of a typical commercial flight is the drive to the airport.
The safety gap is so large, in fact, that planes would still be safer than cars if the threat of terrorism were unimaginably worse than it actually is: An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one passenger jet a week in the United States, a person who took one flight a month for a year would a have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking – a trivial risk compared to the annual 1-in-6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash.
Risk analysts knew all about this safety gap. And they understood what a large-scale shift from planes to cars would mean. It’s simple mathematics. If one person gives up the relative safety of flying and drives instead, it’s not a big deal. He will almost certainly survive. But if millions of people take the same risk, it is just as likely that some of them will lose the gamble and their lives.
But car crashes aren’t like terrorist hijackings. They aren’t covered live on CNN. They aren’t discussed endlessly by pundits. They don’t inspire Hollywood movies and television shows. They aren’t fodder for campaigning politicians. And so in the months following the September 11 attacks, as politicians and journalists worried endlessly about terrorism, anthrax, and dirty bombs, people who fled the airports to be safe from terrorism crashed and bled to death on America’s roads. And nobody noticed.

This is exactly why I setup the Rational Fear website. This looks to be a very good book.

The comparison of the risks of air versus car travel (‘An American professor’) comes from an op-ed piece by Michael Rothschild, emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin, first published in the Washington Post on November 25th 2001. Thanks to Dan Gardner for providing me with the reference.

You can write anything you want. There’s no censor and nothing is recorded, so feel free to scream shout and wail. Tell the world how you feel. Get it off your chest. Go on, it’s good for you. Head over to Plebis.net, and say something!

It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.

The new rule seems to be that if you’re going to spend the time and the money to see someone face to face, be in their face. Interact or stay home!

My thoughts entirely.

Original post: Seth Godin – The new standard for meetings and conferences

If you really don’t want to watch it, read the transcript of Clay Shirky’s talk at Web2.0 Expo.

Mike Huckabee:

What we’ve got to do is to have a secure border fence, something I have proposed that we do within 18 months of taking office.

He doesn’t mean a fence between the USA and Canada. Oh no. He means a fence between the USA and Mexico. It gets better.

Mitt Romney:

Under the ideal setting, at least in my view, you say to those who have just come in recently, we’re going to send you back home immediately, we’re not going to let you stay here. You just go back home.

Those that have been here a long time, with kids that have responsibilities here and so forth, you let stay enough time to organize their affairs and go home.

John McCain:

We will secure the borders first when I am president of the United States. I know how to do that. I come from a border state, where we know about building walls, and vehicle barriers, and sensors, and all of the things necessary.
There’s 2 million people who are here who have committed crimes. They have to be rounded up and deported.

Yes, he actually said they have to be rounded up and deported. Let’s get some numbers on this, from the Wikipedia article on Illegal Immigration (see the article for sources):

In March of 2006 the Pew Hispanic Center estimated the undocumented population ranged from 11.5 to 12 million individuals, a number supported by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). Pew estimated that 57% of this population comes from Mexico; 24% from Central America and, to a lesser extent, South America; 9% from Asia; 6% from Europe, and the remaining 4% from elsewhere.

So illegal immigration into the United States is primarily Latino. Mitt Romney wants to deport 12 million people, and John McCain 2 million. Mike Huckabee didn’t say how many. Can you think of other countries and regimes that have tried to get rid of millions of people from their country?

There are two reassuring points here. Firstly, the only one to of made a firm promise, Mike Huckabee, is trailing Mitt Romney and John McCain, so seems unlikely to be nominated. Secondly, these anti-Latino positions are new for all of them, as The Economist reported:

The mainstream Republican candidates are all on record as supporting fair-minded “comprehensive” immigration reform. John McCain sponsored a reform bill together with his Democratic colleague, Ted Kennedy. Mr Romney mocked the idea that you could deport 12m people. As governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee supported allowing the children of illegal immigrants to claim cheap in-state tuition.

So the candidates may well be saying what they think the voters want to hear – these are primary elections, so they are trying to appeal to hardcore Republicans. The candidates certainly don’t act like they believe their own rhetoric: Mitt Romney actually employs illegal immigrants.

There is a much more intelligent take on immigration at The Economist’s Global Migration report, and more sanity over here.

And as it’s Friday, here’s proof that politicians can sometimes get it, so don’t despair. From the same debate, once they turned to the question of Iraq.

Ron Paul:

So when I talk about these long-term stays, I think, “How many men are you willing to let die for this, for something that has nothing to do with our national security?”

And we have these silly arguments going on about who said what when. I think it’s time to debate foreign policy and why we don’t follow the Constitution and only go to war with a declaration of war.

The audience applauded.

Have you got the memo that the job creation program at airports is because Terrorism is such a big threat to your life ? In England at the moment you are, according to the media, at great threat from drug dealing teenagers, and anyone younger than you in general.

And yet, here you are, reading safely. So instead of tolerating idiots pretending to be journalists, I went looking for what we should really be wary of – what really does kill people.

Rational Fear

Many countries keep very good records for mortality statistics. There is an international standard, known as ICD-10, for recording causes of death. Records are submitted yearly to the World Health Organisation, which makes them available to the public.

I downloaded them, applied a bit of Python / MySQL / Django magic, and produced a searchable database of causes of death, called Rational Fear. This allows you to search causes of death by country, sex, and age group. Try it, it’s quite instructive.

The Western world – killing yourself

The first thing you remember, because you already really know all of this, is that the older you get the more you are at risk. In Western countries you’re quite safe into your fifties and sixties, after which chances of death pick up significantly. People in their late seventies, eighties and nineties die of heart attacks, cancer, and pneumonia.

As you work down through the years, you stop being at risk of dying. In the U.S.A, Japan, and all of Western Europe, no male age group under 80 lost more than 1% of it’s numbers for any recent year. For women, you have to go above 85, above 90 in many countries, to get more than 1% loss in any one year.

What’s even more interesting, is that the very small number that did die, largely killed themselves, in a manner of speaking. Let’s work backwards through the ages, seeing where the real risk lies.

The biggest killer of 60 year old men in the U.S.A, Japan, Austria, Denmark, and many other developped countries is lung cancer. Wikipedia has a great graphic on the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer.

Skip down to 40 – heart attacks and lung cancer are still high, but the biggest killers aren’t those that make the papers:

• Alcoholism is the biggest killers of 40 year old men in Germany, Finland and Hungary.
• Suicide is the biggest killer of 40 year old men in Canada, Denmark, Sweden and Japan.
• Cars are the biggest killer of 40 year old men in Portugal, and the second biggest in France.

The biggest killer of women at 40 in the U.S.A., England, Japan, France, Spain, Poland, all over, is breast cancer. The second biggest killer of women tends to be the same as the men.

Suicide, Alcohol, and road traffic accidents continue to take Western men and women down through their 30s and 20s.

In teenage years alcohol drops away, leaving road traffic accidents and suicide as pretty much the only causes of death amongst Western teenagers of both sexes. Below teenage years, children die so rarely that the figures start to be meaningless.

Once we get all the way back to babies, the danger increases sharply under 1 year old. About 10 to 20 times more babies die before their first birthday than between their 1st and 2nd birthday. The causes of death amongst Western babies are varied and often unknown. The first or second recorded cause of death in most countries is Sudden infant death syndrome, also known as ‘cot death’ or ‘crib death’.

The rest of the world – killing each other

Outside of the ‘Western’ world, many less rich countries run an effective health service, and report mortality statistics to the World Health Organisation. Aside from the presence of ‘Unattended death’ in the records, because many die away from medical attention, the main causes of death are similar. For example, Peruvian women in their 80’s die of pneumonia, heart attacks, and cancers. Belarusian men in their 80’s die of heart attacks.

The differences start to appear at the ages when you really shouldn’t be dying. At 40, heart attacks and cancers (lots of lung cancer) are still high, like in the richer countries. Alcoholism and suicide are big threats in Eastern Europe, but road traffic accidents drop off somewhat. The noticeable additions, which are almost absent in richer countries, are murder and H.I.V.

Being shot is the biggest cause of death of men aged 40 to 44 in Ecuador and Colombia. H.I.V. is the biggest killer of both sexes in their 40’s in Thailand.

As you go down through the years, murder and H.I.V. rapidly become almost the only causes of death in non-Western countries. The main cause of death for men of all age groups between 15 and 40 in Brazil is a gunshot wound inflicted by a third-party. In Argentina H.I.V. overtakes murder when men reach 30, as it does in Haiti at 35.

Prior to entering what seems to be the sex and gun years around 15 or 20, children in less rich countries die in such small numbers that it ceases to be meaningful. Drowning comes up in Cuba, and road traffic accidents in Chile and Peru, but in very small numbers.

Dangerous drugs ?

The only illegal drug that features in mortality statistics is Heroin. For men in Scotland between 20 and 35 it is the most important cause of death (after 35 suicide takes over). In most other countries is features in the 20 – 35 age group, because they have few other causes of death, but even then usually below several variaties of suicide (each method of suicide has it’s own code), and several types of road traffic accident.

The drug that does kill people is, of course, alcohol.

Staying alive

If you’re reading this, you are probably over 1 year old and under 80. Relax. You’re very unlikely to die.

The most interesting sessions for me were the following:

1. Rhys Jones on Offline web applications

   Rhys gets the train from Wales to London regularly, and needed to use webapps in general, and Google Calendar in particular, whilst on the train without a net connection. He evaluated various ways of doing this and ended up writing a proxy that, when offline, pretends to the Javascript in Google Calendar that it is the server, and when online replays all the actions it intercepted. He’s calling it Web2OS and it’s really worth a look.

   Offline web apps is something we’re going to have to solve. Firefox 3 will provide native support for this. Ultimately web application builders will need to figure this out. I expect a lot more interest in this area in the future.

   Rhys’ proxy also allow ‘local mashups’. For example your local proxy can read what music you are playing on your machine (assuming your player has an API), and then provide a local URL where it display Flickr images for the song title. Or it can read your address book, and display a Google Map with your contacts on it. Really cool stuff.

2. Jay Caines-Gooby on building an Amazon EC2 AMI to run webapps, entitled Making Rails Elastic

   Jay talked about how instead of renting a new dedicated server, his company is going to use Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud to rent server power as they need it. Building the AMI (Amazon Machine Image) is easy enough on Linux – you setup a directory, chroot to it, install and get everything working as you want it, then come out of the chroot and package the image up.

   The real challenge is that whenenver your machine is restarted, all disk storage is wiped. The only place you can store something permanently is in Amazon’s S3. Jay talked about ways of mounting S3 as a filesystem, using S3 InfiniDisk, S3FS or S3FS-Fuse; of these InfiniDisk sounds the most mature.

   Running my server off EC2 is something I would love to do, but I think it’s a little too early adopter right now. Definitely one for the future. If this takes off hosting companies will have to following the EC2 model or retire.

3. Simon Willison with Open ID Explained

   OpenID is going to be the main authentication system on the Internet, so I’m really pleased I finally get it ! Next time you’re building a webapp and thinking of writing the authentication section for the millionth time, including the ‘I forgot my password’ page and the dready rest of it, stop. Just add OpenID and be done with it. Your users will thank you.

4. Tom Coates on social web apps Greater than the sum of its parts

   Tom is a visionary, and a great speaker. He really got to the heart of how social web apps (like flickr, facebook, orkut, linkedin, wikipedia, last.fm, etc) work. As I don’t have any plans to build one of these (it takes a tremendous amount of self belief and a skillful marketing operation to create an online community from thin air), I watched his talk more as a lesson on how to present.

5. Janette Girod on Optimising the everyday – Finding Flow

   How to get into the zone and work more productively. The best tip for me was splitting up your work time into 48 minutes total concentration / no distractions / email off / IM off / go for it, and then 12 minutes break, where you get up, walk around, talk to people, and catch up on your communications and web browsing.

6. Gareth Rodgers on Integrating Mobile Messaging with your web applications.

   The crux of this was that the kannel project can drive your mobile phone to send and receive SMS messages, and with mbuni it can do MMS (pictures, audio clips, videos, etc). You connect a mobile phone (via USB or Bluetooth) to your server, and kannel provides an API for you to send and receive messages.

   Most server setups will have an automatic way of sending a message to the administrator if something goes wrong. Nearly all of these will use a third party gateway, charging per SMS. Kannel provides a way to do this without a third party provider. The ability to receive messages also opens up the way for more mobile interaction with your application. Now if I could only convince my hosting provider to plug my phone into the server !

   A few days after that talk Tim Stevens pointed me to the British Telecom SDK, which looks like it provides an easy way to send SMS messages.

7. Papervision 3D a Flash 3D engine.

   Wow ! Proper 3D in Flash. This should make Flash games a lot more fun !

8. Improv workshop by James Aylett

   Not about technology, but one of the best sessions of the weekend. James got the group to try out some Improvisational Theatre. I found it challenging and very funny.

I presented A Jabber Wonderland which I have written about previously. Other presentations can be found on the BarCamp Wiki or on Slideshare barcamplondon2 tag.

All in all it was a fantastic weekend. Many many thanks to the fantastic barcamplondon2 organisers.

Day 1 – Sunday

We arrive in the early afternoon. 15 students, ranging from 25 to 65 years old, from a range of backgrounds. We are collected from a tea house car park and driven by 4×4 into the woods to the camp.

The camp is in or near Eridge Park near Tunbridge Wells. There are Six instructors / helpers, including one women. They are mostly graduates from this school, including the trainee instructor. Lead instructor is Juha Rankinen, a Swedish instructor with over 20 years experience, and best mates with Ray Mears.

The camp has a main area with a fire that they never allow to go out. A parachute hangs over the fire, there are logs to sit on and a brew box. There is a separate instructors area, a latrine off in the woods, and a cooking area (pasta, soup and bread for dinner, cereal with powdered milk or tinned fruit for breakfast).

We are taken on a camp tour, told there will be an exam at the end, and not much else. We have dinner the introduce ourselves and say what we hope to get from the course. I particularly want to learn about wild foods. We are offered a welcome beer, then head a little deeper in the woods to each setup our own bivouac area.

Day 2

The knife is your most important tool. Then it is the saw, then the axe. We are loaned a folding saw and told to build a two-man shelter.

You need a forked stick about neck height and two long straight sticks which lean on the forked stick to form a structure. Then lean sticks all around the sides and back and a bit down the front.

Finally collect big packs of fallen leaves and, starting at the bottom and working up, lay them as if they were tiles or bricks. Pack them round to about hand-to-elbow deep. Make sure no sticks stick out, or water will run down the sticks into your home. Saw off any bits sticking out and cover with leaves.

It takes us about four hours to make the shelter. The leaf stacking is the most time consuming. An experienced team can do it in about two hours apparently.

Sandwiches for lunch.

We are loaned a hoochie, a billy can, and a bivvy bag.

In the afternoon we are each given a knife. Your knife is your life. Knives should have a single bevel – it makes them easier to sharpen, and be ‘full tang’, meaning the metal of the blade goes all the way to the back of the handle.

The sharpen a knife using a sharpening stone: Put stone on flat surface. Lay blade facing away. Tilt onto bevel. Fingers along edge for pressure. Push away and draw blade across stone. Small angle as tip on stone to keep pressure. Aim for a razor edge. Flip knife over and using pressure from thumbs do the other side. When you look down onto the blade (from underneath the knife in normal operation) you should not see any white reflections – they mean a flat surface. Then ’strop’ the knife. Tie a leather belt onto something (tree branch) and rub the edge of the blade onto it to take the razor edge off.

We walk off to a special are of the woods to collect Alder, to make a bow drill. Alder grows in clumps in wet, boggy terrain. We look for a dead standing tree. Slice the bark – the outer bark should be reddish. Push with fingernail. If you make a dent it’s good wood. Kiss it. Warmish and dry is good. Fell the dead tree by cutting 1/3 of the way through on the side you want it to fall, then the rest of the way through on the other side, and push it over. We then set off in search of Hazel. We need Hazel to make a pot holder called a Wogan stick. We make a pot holder, then have dinner (Turkey Korma and rice, then cake).

After dinner, we are taught to make fire. Clear the area and make a little platform out of sticks on the ground to keep the fire off the damp floor and allow air to pass around it. We will be using flint and steel. Striking the steel on the flint produces a spark. Most of bushcraft fire making starts with a spark – it you’re used to make fire straight from a flame (match or lighter), you’ve had it easy !.

To catch the spark we need first stage tinder. This can be anything that will light from a spark, such as very dry grass. In a temperate forest, where we were, the following make great choices: A Scottish mushroom called Horses Hoof, or Amadou. Or char cloth.

To make char cloth, put 100% cotton or silk cloth in a billy can. Make a hole in the billy can. Put the can in the fire. When smoke stops coming out of the hole take it out of the fire, check it, and leave in the can. Cloth should look ‘charcoally’. Or you can simply leave the cloth by the edge of the fire and put it out every time it catches fire. With our flint and steel we are going to use char cloth.

Once your first stage tinder (char cloth in our case) has caught the spark, you need second stage tinder. Dry bracken, shredded inner bark of sweet chestnut, or dry grass are all good choices. Crumple it up to increase the surface area. Then you need very small twigs. Birch twigs are ideal because they contain an oil that burns well, even when they are a bit damp. Then you need bigger and bigger twigs. You need all this before you strike your flint on your steel.

Fold the second stage tinder into a birds nest shape. Lay the char cloth on the flint. Strike the steel through the cloth until an ember catches on the cloth. Blow on it. Fold the cloth over and fold into the birds nest of tinder. Hold it in your hands and stand up – there is less moisture further from the ground. Blow on it some more. When breathing in move the nest up and down to increase air flow. Blow until the whole bundle erupts into flames. Put it down on your platform of twigs and put the birch twigs on top to get them to ignite. Fire ! Make as small a fire as possible using the least amount of fuel you need. Remember to dry out some first and second stage tinder, and some twigs, for use tomorrow morning.

Day 3

It comes as somewhat of a relief that the topic is Hygiene. We don’t have to pretend to be cavemen anymore. Wash feet in the evening, put on dry socks and dry the ones you were wearing. Wool socks don’t smell like cotton ones do. The main instructor, Juha, wears sealskinz gore-tex socks. Heat water and use cloth to wash body. A big handful of birch leaves, 2-3 horse chestnut leaves, or soapwort contain enough saponin to act as a good soap. Keep your toenails trimmed – the health of your feet is very important in bushcraft.

Next we learn more about bow drill fire making. Different woods and how hard they are to use for bow-drill making:

• Very easy: Ivy, Lime.
• Easy: Adler, Elder, Clematis.
• Medium: Aspen, Willow, Sycamore, Rose, Poplar, Birch (although birch is often too rotten).
• Hard: Elm, Hazel, Pine, Spruce, Juniper, Ash, Oak.
• Very hard: Apple.

Generally the harder the wood the more difficult it is to use to make fire with a bow drill. The wood has to be dead standing wood, otherwise it will be too moist. The dryer the wood the easier it will be. Knots make wood harder so make sure there are no knots on your drill end or where it meets the main plank. A friend told me after the course that he kept his bow-drill set indoors overnight so that the central heating dried it out. The next day it was much easier to use.

Then we make a wooden spoon. In Bushcraft, there is some kind of mystique associated with carving wooden spoons. Given that anything you can eat with a spoon you can probably drink (or at least slurp), the emphasis on spoon carving isn’t exactly rational. It does however teach good knife technique.

Find a piece of wood the width of which you can wrap you hand 3/4 of the way around, and which has a small curve in it. Split down the middle and work with the bottom half (it’s easier than the top half). Draw a spoon (using charcoal) onto the wood and carve it out so you have something that looks like a spoon from the top. Do the same for the side profile. Make it thicker in one profile if you went too thin in the other. Finally carve out the bowl using a crook knife. Mind your thumb !

Next it’s onto rope making. You can make rope from nettles (if you dry them first the rope will last longer) or the inner bark of the sweet chestnut tree, taken from a living tree. Scrape off the outer bark with the back of your knife. Cut a long section and peel off the inner bark. The longer the section the longer the strands you have for weaving, which makes it much easier. The same inner bark, but dead and dry, makes good tinder. Roll up and bash the bark to separate the strings, then dry it.

On to feather sticks. Split a log into very thin kindling size sticks. Remove the bark and any moist outer wood. Using the knife bevel scrape curls of wood down the length of the stick. You want the curls to be as thing as possible. Lay four sticks across each other and put a match underneath. In a wet forest the inside of dead standing wood will still be dry, so can be used for making feather sticks if you have no other dry wood.

The instructors give us some food. We make fire with our feather sticks, cook our food using our wogan stick, and sleep in our shelter. Perfect !

Day 4

The morning starts with more bow drill practice. Making fire with a bow drill is difficult !

There is a talk on breaking camp. We tear down our shelters and disperse the wood we used to build them. Make sure the fire is out then disperse the ashes and cover the fire pit. If it is dry season make sure the ashes are cold, also make holes in the ground and pour water in them.

Gutting a fish: There is a demonstration on two big salmon. Cut from the butt to back of the head underneath the fish. Scoop out all the guts. Throw them away if you are unsure of the water quality. Cut the fins off. Cut the skin around head and tail. Put your hand between the skin and the bones and peel bones off. A perfect fish skeleton with the head and tail attached (like cats eat in cartoons) should come off.

Cooking the fish: We are going to ‘panace’ the fish, Native American (First Nations) style. Split a long piece of Hazel almost all the way down the middle. Spear the salmon steak all the way through with two thin sticks to hold it flat. Sandwich the salmon between the split sections of the hazel. My notes don’t indicate this, but you probably have to bind the top of the split hazel back together. Cook above a fire until it looks tasty. The last 5 minutes of cooking but it skin side down onto the embers. This is truly delicious.

Navigation is next. Another lecture in the main area under the parachute. The United Kingdom is divided by the Ordnance Survey (government mapping company) into 100 km² squares. Map references start with the two letters indicating which square to use. Our bushcraft camp is in the TQ square. Magnetic and map (grid) North usually differ slightly because the magnetic north moves. The map will often indicate the difference. In practice the difference is too small to make a difference when on foot, and when there are occasional landmarks to correct yourself by. Average walking speed over flat grass is 15 minutes to a kilometer.

We are given a map (1:25000) with all features except contour lines, forests, rivers and lakes removed. We are told where we are and where we have to get to. We split into two groups and head off. It’s a nice stroll, past lots of deer.

Once at destination we cover water: We need 1.5 to 5 liters a day in temperate European climate, depending on the temperate / season. Always carry clean water with you. Look for running water. If near a lake look for the stream that feeds it. Before purifying water you can pre-filter it to remove organic matter by pouring it through cotton (a sock or t-shirt).

Purify water through:

• Boiling it: Water must reach a rolling boil with big bubbles. It doesn’t need to stay like that long – once the rolling boil is achieved the water is clean.
• Chemical treatment: A pump with iodine in the tube, or iodine drops or tablets. The pump type is preferable as you only get the minimum amount of chemicals.

We wade into a very muddy lake (between Eridge Park and Forge Wood in the map linked on Day 1) to collect cattails. You can eat the base of the stem. Peal the outside layers off and eat the inside. It’s like eating a big leek, but softer.

The root is a rhizome which runs parallel to the ground from one plant to the next. We pull one out each. There is carbohydrate in there. Later on we will roast them in the fire. Put the whole root directly in the fire. When it is charred on the outside remove, peel, and eat the inner white bit. Be careful not to eat the outside.

When collecting cattails make sure not to confuse them with the poisonous Iris which grows near it – the Iris does not have the cotton flower, and has a regular root running up-down instead of a rhizome.

We head off and stroll through some woods. You can eat the young leaves of beach and hawthorn. I eat some – they taste of leaves. If you can spot it, Wood Sorrel is a tasty garnish. It is a small three leafed clover-like plant that grows in shaded wooded areas. Base of the stem is purple-reddish.

We head further into the woods and stop to setup camp. We bivouac using a basha (also known by it’s Australian name – hootchie) strung between two trees and pegged out (we carve pegs on the spot out of sticks). We will sleep under it in a bivvie bag (a gore tex waterproof sleeping bag cover). We are shown the knots to use to setup our basha. The two main instructors head back to base and we stay out with three assistants.

We make camp and collect water. We make fire with a Swedish firesteel and birch bark. Scrape and peel the bark to have paper-like hanging off the main bark. Spark onto those, and add more bark scrapings onto it. Once caught give it some more bark and very small twigs, ideally birch because of the oils it contains. We boil the water so we can drink it. We kebab a trout (provided already gutted) and cook some rice. I make some notes then turn in for the night.

Day 5

We wake up under our bashas. I go to the stream to collect water and boil it for cooking breakfast, hygiene, and drinking water for the day. After breakfast we are shown how to pack up our bashas. We make an effort to cover traces of our camp.

Sit by the lake – more bow drill practice. With two people it is possible to make fire with the bow drill. On your own it is very hard work.

Juha and Laurence show up to teach us about tracking. They take us back into the woods where we camped and show us signs you can use. Look for things that are out of place / unnatural. A charred stick, carved, with a fork in it, means someone cooked. Cut branches. Food remains. Unnatural birch bark curls. Our attempts to cover our tracks turn out to of been quite poor. We do a better job.

We stroll off. The birch polypore skin makes a good plaster. This is a whitish flat fungus which can grow to the size of a hand spread out.

The sweet chestnut inner bark strands we prepared earlier are dry and ready to weave. We are shown how to weave two or three (I don’t remember exactly) strands of bark together to make rope. I really enjoyed learning to make rope.

We meet a variety of plants:

• Thistle – shave the stalk (clear sap) and eat. Roast the root in the fire to eat.
• Lesser celandine which you can chew to numb mouth pain.
• Yarrow can help heal wounds.
• Flowering plants typically don’t have much root because they have used their energy to produce the flower. Try and catch plants before they flower for a good size root.
• The taproot of Burdock can be roasted and eaten. Dig it up in Autumn, Winter or very early spring. Unfortunately it grows mostly in very rocky ground, so digging out the root can be difficult.

It is possible to live on cat-tail roots and burdock roots, but you would lack nutrients long term.

Our walk through the woods takes us to a river. We talk about fishing. It’s a good option when living off the land. A spinning rod (normal fishing rod) helps a lot. Juha carries mono-filament fishing line (quite thick), shots for weight (you could use stones), and barbed hooks in different sizes. Use live bait – anything edible. Instead of bait you can use a lure. You can also catch fish by snagging them – throw a triple hook over the head of a fish you can see and pull the hook into it.

Stringing a net across the width of a river should catch lots of fish – the same can be done between trees to catch birds. Thorns or bits of wood bound together can be used as hooks. Attach a small thorn to a rope, feed that into a worm / insect. When the fish eats the worm pull hard to hook the inside of the fish.

The best times for fishing are usually early mornings or evenings, sometimes even night. Look for bubbles of fish breathing breaking the surface. Shaded areas overhung by trees, near rocks, or small islands in the stream, are all good places to cast.

We make a night line. This is a line which will be hung over the river, with lots of smaller weighted lines with hooks on them hanging off it deep into the water. The hooks would be baited.

The school doesn’t have a license to fish, so we can’t actually try the techniques out. A lot of them would be illegal anyway – we are talking about back-country fishing or survival situations.

We head back into the woods, gaining height. We make camp in a beautiful area full of bluebells. Spend a very pleasant evening round our little campfire discussing bushcraft with a couple of the assistants. One of them is on secondment from the Dutch army’s mountain reconnaissance unit. The other loves the woods, and has done odd jobs all his life to be able to spend more time in them. Together they remind me of Beavis and Butthead.

Day 6

We pack and stroll back to base camp. On the way we are shown how to make a withy (essentially using a willow branch to make a strong thick rope). Not much time is allocated to this, and it’s a difficult technique. No-one in the party manages it, but we are impressed by how Juha makes a bow out of a willow branch.

We stop below a big pine tree. The needles, steeped in water, make a tea with lots of vitamin C and some sugar. Pretty much any pine tree’s needles will do. The very long thin roots which run out from pine or spruce parallel to the ground make good binding material. They can be used straight away. Better yet, scrape off the bark, dry, then soak before use. Split length ways trying to achieve two long sections. If the split runs towards one side bend the thick end more.

We will be making a fish hook. A thorn will be the spiky bit. It will be bound to a small carved piece of soft wood. The binding will be the pine root.

We are greeted back at base camp by all the ingredients to make a fried breakfast / brunch. Nice.

After eating we are given time to work on our projects. I make cord from the sweet chestnut bark. The group has gotten to know each other and gelled very well. Banter and jokes are exchanged. It’s quite a disparate group: A scout leader, a yorkshire bus driver, a tree surgeon, a forestry instructor, two mountain leaders, and several IT professionals. We help each other out in the bits we learned faster.

The Woodlore shop visits and they lay out their goods. I buy a Swedish firesteel. I browse the Fundamental Bushcraft book and resolve to buy it online when I get home.

Then it’s time to learn about trapping. We will snaring birds, or small mammals such as squirrels and rabbits. Our snares will Mangle, Tangle or Strangle.

The best place to lay snares are on the animal’s runs, not too close to their warrens. They would notice something different around their warrens straight away – best to wait till they are out running on the ‘motorway’ where they are not as aware of their surroundings. Look for droppings, flattened grass or the actual animals, to know where to lay the traps. Lay them late afternoon (before dusk), and check them each day at dawn and dusk, to prevent predators getting to your snared dinner.

First we learn a sprung bird trap. When the bird puts its foot in the rope it dislodges a carefully placed small branch, which releases a much stronger branch which grabs the birds leg and lifts it into the air – a nice piece of bushcraft engineering. We use the rope we have been making from the inner bark of sweet chestnut for this.

Two years after this bushcraft course, I was in the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle visiting an Achuar community, and they showed us a very similar trap. Possibly that is whom Ray Mears learnt it from. Or they both came up with it independently. Or Ray taught the Achuar (he does get around).

To trap squirrels we position a large fallen branch so as to create a shortcut between the ground and a tree branch. Apparently squirrels will usually take the shortest route to where they are trying to go. We put 7 to 10 simple steel wire loops at squirrel head height all the way up the branch.

Finally we do a rabbit trap. This is a larger loop of doubled over brass wire, fed through an eyelet using a small twig to keep it hanging at rabbit head height. The loop is tied to a rope or cord which is anchored to the ground with a strong peg. The whole trap is setup on a rabbit run. Try and locate where the front and back legs go and place it just in front of the front legs.

As about 15 people a week learn trapping on this estate, there would be nothing left if we got to actually practice. We take our traps down and head back up the hill to camp. The instructors have bought us each a freshly shot rabbit off a local farmer. We pretend we just snared it, and learn to gut it. As I have various cuts and scratches on my hands from the weeks knife work, I get to wear plastic gloves.

Squeeze out any remaining urine by pressing down along the belly. Cut the skin in the middle stomach (be careful not to cut into the actual stomach) and tear the skin off. Break the four feet off, cutting the tendons if needed. Pull up the stomach area, cut it open, and shake / pull the guts out. This is the smelly bit. If there are white nodules on the liver don’t eat the liver. Punch fingers through the diaphragm and pull the lungs and heart out. Push fingers in bum to clear, and cut off the tail. Pull the head off. You should now have a small fur bag – put the offal in there and bury it, or use it as fishing bait. Cut off the ’skirt’ bits.

For those of us unused to country matters, this is gruesome. A strong streak of black humour pervades the group, and we get on with the task. To get the meat slice along the spinal cord either side and pull out the saddle meat. This is the main meat on a rabbit. Break / cut the legs off. There is more meat on the back leg, and a tiny bit on the front leg. We stick to the saddle meat.

The smell of fresh rabbit guts is not particularly strong, or particularly unpleasant, but it sure does stick around. Despite numerous scrubbings, I could still smell it on my hands days later.

The meat goes into a pot and we eat rabbit stew. The instructors tell us there will be a test tomorrow. I make bits for my fish hook, practice feather sticks, start some more rope, and go to bed. Sleeping outside in the spring, and waking up in the woods, is a wonderful experience. It gets cold at night so I sleep fully clothed. I sleep better and better each night.

Day 7 – Saturday

I rise early on this, the last day of the course. I bind my fish hook, prepare my rabbit snare, and pack. We shoulder our packs and head a short distance down the hill to do the test. It is:

• Put up basha and prepare sleeping area.
• Make fire with one match and feather sticks.
• Put that fire out, and make fire again with the bow drill.
• Boil a pot of water on that fire.
• Identify the 19 plants laid out by the instructors.
• Setup our snares.
• Lay out what we made this week: Spoon, fish hook, withy, night line.

I get everything setup and done very quickly, then struggle all morning with the bow drill. After several hours I’m out of breath, my arm aches, and my knuckles are bleeding from rubbing on the ground. I get lots of smoke, a big pile of black dust, but no ember. Juha lends me his set, which doesn’t help. Finally Juha helps out and we do a two man bow drill – very quickly, we have an ember. In a real situation, I hope I have a match, a lighter, or my swedish firesteel. Or a friend.

After the test we clear the site and head back up the hill to the main camp. We return all our kit, except the knife which is ours to keep.

A fellow course member shows me how to fold the basha / hoochie. It must be still setup. Fold and tie the guy ropes. Then accordion the sheet to get a rectangle. Untie the ropes and lay on the ground. Fold in half length ways. Fold in the guy ropes then fold up in small sections. Wrap the end of main rope round one way, and the other end round the other way. This makes a nice hoochie package.

The instructors all gather and hand out our certificates. Everyone passes, although some get a special mention. Clapping, handshakes, and photos.

Someone drops me back in Tunbridge Wells. It is a spring Sunday afternoon, the sun is shining, and the streets are busy with urbane, attractive shoppers. I feel shell-shocked, and very out of place. I sit on the train back to London, and make more rope from the inner bark of a sweet chestnut tree.

Conclusion

I learned a lot on that Woodlore course. They really packed it in, and now almost three years later I can still remember most of it. So the course works.

It was a good group, and most of the instructors were great. Juha was an inspiring wise man of the woods. Lawrence, the second lead instructor was, unfortunately, miserable. I think he is now the main instructor, so check before booking. Oh, and you’re not going to meet Ray Mears.

The style was too military for my taste. We were generally not told what was going to happen next, and the instructions were of the type: ‘Gather a branch of this shape and length from this species of tree. Go’. Only later would we discover what that branch was for. Part of the reason for this was to put us under stress to test our psychological aptitudes, bushcraft being as much about a calm and comfortable approach to nature as it is about skills. The rest of the reason is the instructors probably find that style cuts down on questions, and they want an easy life. I would of enjoyed it more and probably learned better had the instructors been more open with us.

Would I do it again ? Most definitely, although I would probably try and go with Woodsmoke, run by the previous lead instructor at the Woodlore school. One of their prior students, also on the Woodlore course, told me they had a less military approach to bushcraft.

Whoever you go with, you get to spend a week in the woods, and it’s hard to beat that.

They cannot simply fill their media with invention and humour in order to entertain; they must allow the paying public to believe they are consuming serious, factual journalism. It is this complicity of denial between journalist and consumer that has filled our media with celebrity lives and gruesome stories. The journalist is reporting facts and the consumer is entertained by the voyeurism and horror. They will not admit to being entertained lest they be thought deranged or perverse. And the cycle continues, burrowing ever deeper in search of the salacious and disturbing to fill yet more serious, factual media.

All this to say don’t buy a book based on it’s reviews on Amazon – they may only represent one side of the story.

Amazon: Good web services, unethical editors.

Update: It seems this practice is nothing new. See articles in the New-York Times, and online here and here

Tom Coates used to work for the BBC, and has recently joined Yahoo. He has worked with Simon Willson. Tom had a highly polished presentation. Here are the notes:

• We are moving from web pages connected by links to data connected by APIs.

• The Web 2.0 design aesthetic can be summed up as: Rounded corners and gradient fills.

• The future according to Tom: A web of data sources, services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways that users can connect them together.

• Mash-up: A network effect of services. Web as a platform. Hybridization of web services together makes both of them better.

• APIs drive people to your site, allow people to enhance your site. You don’t have to do all the work yourself. People might start charging for the user of their APIs.

• “What can I build that will make the whole web better ?” The Aggregate Web. It’s all about data – owning, exploring, manipulating.

• Build for normal users (the HTML interface), for developers (the API), and for machines (XML, predictable and consistent URLs and structure)

• Start designing with data, not pages. Navigable, re-usable, explorable data.
• Identify core objects that people will refer to. For the BBC, that’s programs, films, events, people. Then make each core object addressable by URL.
• Good URLs: permanent, readable, and have a 1 to 1 correlation with concepts. Use directories to represent hierarchy. Predictable, guessable, hackable. Reflect structure of data. Only 1 URL for a piece of data. For example the BBC needs to have one and only one URL for a single program. That way all entries on the web will connect to that one URL, and will be connected themselves.

• Correlate with external identifier schemes (such as ISBN)in your URLs, or coin a standard if there isn’t one. If 100 people are blogging about a film, they need to be connected somehow – if they all link to the same BBC or IMDB page, they will be connected.

• Build list views and batch manipulation interfaces. Types of page:

  • Destination page (the entry of a film). Make XML versions of these.
  • List page (search results, lots of films). Make RSS versions of these.
  • Manipulation page (comment on a film). If needed, use AJAX / Flash here.

• Make sure your AJAX / Flash doesn’t break your URLs. Keep it in the page. Only manipulate the concept of that page.

• Use standard formats where possible. See microformats.org.

• Make your data as discoverable as possible.

  That’s the end of my notes ! See also a good mind map of this talk

• Open questions invite the other person to express their thinking freely rather than allowing a “yes” or “no” response. Open questions usually begin with Who, Why, When, Where or How. For example:

  • “How much petrol do you use per week ?”
  • “Where do you normally get your petrol from ?”

• Closed questions can be answered with a yes or no. They tend to close a conversation down. However, they can be useful for checking facts, clarifying a point, or deliberately finishing a conversation. They can also control the length and form of the reply and allow a “yes” or “no” or brief response. They can be useful on the streets, especially as an opening line.

• Multiple Questions combine many questions together, making it unclear which question to respond to. People can become confused. Less is more ! For example:

  • “Have you seen, heard or know about Greenpeace ?”
  • “Do you think Esso is bad, or just like the others, or what ?”

• Leading Questions reflect an assumption, or give an obvious direction to the reply, indicating the desired response. Leading questions hint at what you want the answer to be. They don’t allow a person freedom of expression, or require them to really engage or think. They should usually be avoided and certainly abandonded if they are met with any resistance. For example:

  • “You like peace don’t you ?”
  • “It’s the only way, isn’t it ?”

• Hypothetical Questions can be good for opening up options and helping people to explore possibilities. However answers bear little relation to what would actually hapen. For example:

  • “If I could prove to you that Esso have absolutely no commitment to the environment, would we get your support ?”

• Probing Questions are good for following up information already received but can lead to a lengthy conversation which should be avoided! For example:

  • “Why do you say that ?”

  More details on the campaign to boycott Esso

Strategy is the art of distributing and applying military means to fulfill the ends of policy – Lidell Hart

Strategy must now be understood as nothing less than the overall plan for utilizing the capacity for armed coercion – in conjunction with economic, diplomatic, and psychological instruments of power – to support foreign policy most effectively by overt, covert, and tacit means. – Robert Osgood

Strategy is the theory and practice of the use, and threat of use, of organized force for political purposes. – Colin Gray

This section is sourced from Strategy in the contemporary world, An Introduction to Strategic Studies by John Baylis, James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen and Colin S. Gray. It is a book I highly recommend. Any miskates are my own.

Relevance

Strategic Studies is the bridge between military means and political goals; it is a sub-field of Security Studies, itself a sub-field of International Relations which is a sub-field of Political Science. From the 50’s to the 80’s it was the dominant sub-field of International Relations.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but the NATO powers had barely had time to start re-appraising their military needs when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, followed by a decade of Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, leading straight into the attack on World Trade Center, then the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The end of the Cold War has not brought peace to everyone, nor given strategic planners much more sleep.

Mind-set

The philosophical viewpoint of contemporary strategists is what they call Realism.

Realism is a clear recognition of the limits of reason in politics: the acceptance of the fact that political realities are power realities and that power must be countered with power; that self-interest is the primary datum in the action of all groups and nations – Gordon Harland

Realism has a pessimistic view of human nature, subscribing to the views of Thomas Hobbes that people are inherently destructive, selfish, competitive and aggressive, and that these destructive traits can never be eliminated. Strategists attempts to minimise the likelihood and severity of international violence, but do not believe in the possibility of permanent peace.

Strategic studies focuses on the relationships between states. Unlike domestic society, there is no authoritative government to create justice and the rule of law. Realists note that states reserve the right to use lethal force to achieve their objectives, a right that individuals living in civil society have given up to the state. Who wins in international relations does not depend on who is right according to some moral or legal ruling but purely on the balance of power.

Realists see a limited role for ‘reason’, law, morality and supra-national institutions in world politics. As there is no ‘world government’ to enforce international law, to promote a universal moral code, or even to enforce the decisions of organisations such as the United Nations, states will agree with the law, moral code or decree when it suits them and disregard it when it threatens their interests. Realists see supra-national organisations not as truly independent actors but as agents set up by states to further their national interest.

Criticism

If you have read this far, you may well be thinking that the field of Strategic Studies is obsessed with conflict and force, insufficiently concerned with ethical issues, part of the problem, not the solution, and state-centric. These are the main points of criticism of Strategic Studies.

They respond by saying that yes they are interested in conflict and violence, in fact that is what they study, in the same way that computer programmers are interested in computers. They recognise that their field of study is only a sub-field of International Relations.

On the second point, they claim that they cannot let ethics interfere with their morally neutral scholarly detachment.

The third point, that strategists are part of the problem, not the solution, can be translated as: viewing military power as a legitimate instrument of policy helps to perpetuate a particular mind-set among national leaders and the public which encourages the use of force. Strategists respond that they reflect, rather than create, the reality of international relations. That most policymakers and elected officials tend to share their assumptions is because of the threats and challenges presented to them, not because of the strategists mind-set. They believe that conflict cannot be permanently avoided, but that effective strategy can mitigate it.

On that final criticism, that they are state centric, they say that they do concern themselves with intra-state conflict (Kosovo, Bosnia, Chechnya), but as the state is the main actor in world politics, that continues to be their main focus.

This system takes the e-mails in your In-box, the ideas and reminders in your head, on scraps of paper, in your notebook, your PDA, wherever, and organizes them so that none of them get lots, and the important ones get acted upon.

h2. Gather everything together

Make or buy an in-tray. Then gather those unpaid bills, scraps of paper, books, printouts, TO-DO lists, jot down the ideas from your head, and pile it all in the in-tray. Next do the same for your electronic data, using your e-mail In-box. Most likely there will already be quite a few e-mails in there. E-mail yourself with anything else you need recorded and processed.

Make two special folders in you mail client – one called @action and one @waiting. Make or buy two similar trays for the real world. Buy a sectioned / expanding file. If you haven’t already got a diary, get one.

h2. Process

Once you have everything gathered take e-mails or pieces of paper one by one and run through this diagram:

Everything starts at stuff and ends up in one of the circles.

Calendar should be only actions with a hard date / time (meetings, appointments, birthdays). Things that you would like to get done on a particular day go into Actions.

If needed, Actions can be split by location: Calls, At Computer, Errands, At Office, At Home, Read / Review.

Look at the Calendar daily, first thing. Then look at the Actions list.

Do a Weekly Review of everything – this is whatever needs doing to keep the system up to date – get the ideas in the world onto paper. In a business context, Friday early afternoon is good for this.